This project is anchored in two theoretical realms. On the one hand, the recent rise in the humanities and social sciences of what has come to be known as the field of secrecy studies (Birchall 2016), concerned with the central role played by secrets in public life, political structures and cultural representations, and fundamentally indebted to Georg Simmel’s sociological work on secrecy as a determining factor in social relationships. On the other hand, the idea, indebted to Jacques Derrida, that literature constitutes the privileged realm for the thinking of the secret. In their defence of the value of secrecy, thinkers and scholars in the field of secrecy studies tend to focus on secrets from a social and political point of view, and here lies the main contribution of this project: to show the crucial ways in which literature may contribute to our understanding and analysis of secrecy. In doing so, we are following a long line of critics and theorists – constituting our second theoretical anchor – that have approached literature as the realm of secrecy par excellence.

A tentative formulation of the connection between these two theoretical concerns may be succinctly put as follows: literary texts, to the extent that they remain always open for further interpretations which do not exhaust the immediate context of reading, can be perceived as exemplary forms of secrecy, replicating an operating mechanism which is to be found in all forms of human sociability and public life, as argued by Simmel. In our main aim to establish a dialogue between secrecy studies and literary studies, we are fundamentally indebted to the work of Jacques Derrida, in which the “implications” of his thoughts on the secret, as argued by Derek Attridge, “still have to be followed through with any comprehensiveness” (2010: 42).

The burgeoning field of secrecy studies may be characterized by its critique of a hegemonic discourse of transparency in public life, identified as a feature of political liberalism. This critique tends to be grounded on two different realms: 1) the tendency to establish a binary opposition between transparency and secrecy in which moral alignments are consistently traced; and 2) the totalizing tendencies of technopolitical transparency, whose most direct theoretical rendering is found in Foucaultian analyses of disciplinary societies.

The connection between literature and democracy seems to work, we may tentatively argue, at two levels: 1) as the realm where dissidence and resistance may be expressed, where the ideas of freedom of expression and censorship come to play most explicitly, and where, as Derrida argues in Given Time, an individual may refuse to take responsibility for whatever he/she may have written. 2) as the realm where the impossibility of full disclosure in any aspect of human life is most visible, as the literary work is precisely one that never exhaust its interpretive potential in a given context, so that the singularity of the text (Attridge) is made evident in each and every reading. As argued by Attridge (2020), the issue of form does not feature explicitly in Derrida’s account of the secret. Thus we join him in claiming that “the formal properties of literary works play a significant part in their impenetrability; they do not fold seamlessly into the meanings of the text.” A main concern in this project, then, is to identify these formal properties.

This project is anchored in two theoretical realms. On the one hand, the recent rise in the humanities and social sciences of what has come to be known as the field of secrecy studies (Birchall 2016), concerned with the central role played by secrets in public life, political structures and cultural representations, and fundamentally indebted to Georg Simmel’s sociological work on secrecy as a determining factor in social relationships. On the other hand, the idea, indebted to Jacques Derrida, that literature constitutes the privileged realm for the thinking of the secret. In their defence of the value of secrecy, thinkers and scholars in the field of secrecy studies tend to focus on secrets from a social and political point of view, and here lies the main contribution of this project: to show the crucial ways in which literature may contribute to our understanding and analysis of secrecy. In doing so, we are following a long line of critics and theorists – constituting our second theoretical anchor – that have approached literature as the realm of secrecy par excellence.

A tentative formulation of the connection between these two theoretical concerns may be succinctly put as follows: literary texts, to the extent that they remain always open for further interpretations which do not exhaust the immediate context of reading, can be perceived as exemplary forms of secrecy, replicating an operating mechanism which is to be found in all forms of human sociability and public life, as argued by Simmel. In our main aim to establish a dialogue between secrecy studies and literary studies, we are fundamentally indebted to the work of Jacques Derrida, in which the “implications” of his thoughts on the secret, as argued by Derek Attridge, “still have to be followed through with any comprehensiveness” (2010: 42).

The burgeoning field of secrecy studies may be characterized by its critique of a hegemonic discourse of transparency in public life, identified as a feature of political liberalism. This critique tends to be grounded on two different realms: 1) the tendency to establish a binary opposition between transparency and secrecy in which moral alignments are consistently traced; and 2) the totalizing tendencies of technopolitical transparency, whose most direct theoretical rendering is found in Foucaultian analyses of disciplinary societies.

The connection between literature and democracy seems to work, we may tentatively argue, at two levels: 1) as the realm where dissidence and resistance may be expressed, where the ideas of freedom of expression and censorship come to play most explicitly, and where, as Derrida argues in Given Time, an individual may refuse to take responsibility for whatever he/she may have written. 2) as the realm where the impossibility of full disclosure in any aspect of human life is most visible, as the literary work is precisely one that never exhaust its interpretive potential in a given context, so that the singularity of the text (Attridge) is made evident in each and every reading. As argued by Attridge (2020), the issue of form does not feature explicitly in Derrida’s account of the secret. Thus we join him in claiming that “the formal properties of literary works play a significant part in their impenetrability; they do not fold seamlessly into the meanings of the text.” A main concern in this project, then, is to identify these formal properties.

The aim of this project is to analyse the secret as the main narrative device used by seven contemporary writers in English to articulate the relation between the individual and community. In the narratives selected, the secret works in three main ways, often in dialectical confrontation. First, as the essence or substance (purity, sacrifice/violence, the sacred, political conspiracy) upon which the exclusive and excluding character of the community is built. Second, secrecy – manifested as silence, interruption, marginality, alterity or death – emerges as the space and language of illicit social bonds, forbidden identities and peripheral voices in the face of normative and essentialised forms of community and their discursive codification. Finally, we find communities of secrecy that do not respond to traditional and conventional collective forms based upon national identity, social class, ethnicity/race, gender or sexuality. The secret articulates the disembedding from totalitarian communities, such as the patriarchal state, heteronormative relationships, the colonial empire, or the ethnically/racially pure nation, and the emergence of new relationships and spaces of freedom, based on a secret sharing of love, friendship, or other non-homogenising communitarian bonds, perpetually open to the difference of the other.

In order to do so, we will draw on the role played by the secret in the communitarian thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, the three of whom have argued against immanent communities, through an ethico-political gesture that puts the emphasis on collective forms characterised by irreducible singularity, secrecy and otherness. In this way we will engage in dialogue with a currently vibrant critical field – the application of communitarian theories to literary criticism – in which the role of the secret in the construction of literary communities remains to be examined. On the other hand, studies on literary secrecy have tended to be either too formalist or too restrictive in their approach, most of them focusing on the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, with a virtual lack of attention to 20th and 21st century literary texts.

As regards our primary corpus, the writers selected are relevant in their substantial engagement with both secrecy and community. Their geographical variety responds to the desire to provide a comprehensive view of the different (trans)national and socio-historical communities, and ethnic and racial identities, to which contemporary narrative in English responds: Jeanette Winterson (English), Toni Morrison (African American), Zoë Wicomb (South African-Scottish), Alice Munro (Canadian), Witi Ihimaera (New Zealand), Anne Enright (Irish) and Jhumpa Lahiri (South Asian American).

The aim of this project is to describe in some detail what I call the «political ontology» underwriting Shakespeare’s poetic and dramatic texts. Although ultimately derived from Bourdieu’s use of the term, «political ontology» here designates a down-top organization of reality that, rooted in the lexical resources of Scholastic metaphysics, is available in the surface of the standard Shakespeare text. Only by examining in depth the logic that connects a handful of basic notions like «unity», «singularity», «nature», «change», «decay», «creature», «substance», «accident» or «multiplicity» can we place ourselves in a position to adjudicate on the vexed issue of Shakespeare’s political vision. There have been several attempts at pinpointing the ground logic—the DNA, the ur-myth, or sociological condition–that gives a sense of unity to the entire Shakespeare textual corpus. My project, inspired in work by Lupton, Wilson, and post-Heideggerian philosophers, proposes a version of this logic that is not incompatible with some of the existing versions. In fact, I draw indistinctly on the work of critics as different as Hughes and Wilson in order to substantiate some of my points. By moving down-top from ontology to politics, I endeavor to run the gamut of fields (ontology-psychology-ethics-politics) that organize the standard reading of a Shakespeare play/poem. The novelty of my approach lies in its primary grip on ontology. Four basic concepts (singularity, creativity, fatality, community) articulate my reading. They are logically connected and move down-top towards higher degrees of formalization. Although only the fourth, community, is a decidedly political notion, Shakespeare’s construal of creativity (based on language-or-money-mediated desire) and fatality (based often on mimetic triangulation) presuppose the political; singularity (the potestas of the unrepeatable creature) is moreover both the condition and the impossibility of the political.

The aim of this project is to analyse the secret as the main narrative device used by seven contemporary writers in English to articulate the relation between the individual and community. In the narratives selected, the secret works in three main ways, often in dialectical confrontation. First, as the essence or substance (purity, sacrifice/violence, the sacred, political conspiracy) upon which the exclusive and excluding character of the community is built. Second, secrecy – manifested as silence, interruption, marginality, alterity or death – emerges as the space and language of illicit social bonds, forbidden identities and peripheral voices in the face of normative and essentialised forms of community and their discursive codification. Finally, we find communities of secrecy that do not respond to traditional and conventional collective forms based upon national identity, social class, ethnicity/race, gender or sexuality. The secret articulates the disembedding from totalitarian communities, such as the patriarchal state, heteronormative relationships, the colonial empire, or the ethnically/racially pure nation, and the emergence of new relationships and spaces of freedom, based on a secret sharing of love, friendship, or other non-homogenising communitarian bonds, perpetually open to the difference of the other.

In order to do so, we will draw on the role played by the secret in the communitarian thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, the three of whom have argued against immanent communities, through an ethico-political gesture that puts the emphasis on collective forms characterised by irreducible singularity, secrecy and otherness. In this way we will engage in dialogue with a currently vibrant critical field – the application of communitarian theories to literary criticism – in which the role of the secret in the construction of literary communities remains to be examined. On the other hand, studies on literary secrecy have tended to be either too formalist or too restrictive in their approach, most of them focusing on the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, with a virtual lack of attention to 20th and 21st century literary texts.

As regards our primary corpus, the writers selected are relevant in their substantial engagement with both secrecy and community. Their geographical variety responds to the desire to provide a comprehensive view of the different (trans)national and socio-historical communities, and ethnic and racial identities, to which contemporary narrative in English responds: Jeanette Winterson (English), Toni Morrison (African American), Zoë Wicomb (South African-Scottish), Alice Munro (Canadian), Witi Ihimaera (New Zealand), Anne Enright (Irish) and Jhumpa Lahiri (South Asian American).

The aim of this project is to improve the heuristic potential of hermeneutic models currently at work in the interpretation of contemporary fiction in English. This potential improvement is seen as emerging from the comprehensive redefinition of the notions of community and immunity as theorized in continental, post-phenomenological philosophy (Derrida, Nancy, Blanchot, Sloterdijk, Agamben, Esposito, Badiou) in the interests of the interpretation of narrative discourse. This entails a reassessment of the centrality of generic and rhetorical community-building modes such as the romance or the pastoral, virtually anti-communitarian modes like irony and satire, along with the introduction of alternative tropes like the secret, the sacred, the sacrifice or apocalypse. This project aims thus at pursuing further, along lines already broached by theorists like J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge, the deconstructionist concern with ethical predicament in literary texts. There will be, however, a preferential focus on Badiou’s controversially anti-Levinasian and militantly anti-communitarian conception of ethics as an essentially non-differential and truth-producing realm. Through this theoretical commitment to a re-conceptualized notion of community, we hope to escape both from the excessive formalism of some postmodernist approaches to fiction and from the arguably jejune sociology of some postcolonial readings. The theoretical hypothesis will be tested against a textual corpus made up of the novels of six representative authors: V.S. Naipaul, Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Janet Frame, Edna O’Brien and J.M. Coetzee. This corpus will be later extended to include novelists from an earlier generation which may have influenced our six representative authors: Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Robertson Davies, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce and Alex La Guma.